Eliza Rose by Lucy Worsley

Title: Eliza Rose

Author: Lucy Worsley

Genre: Historical Fiction

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Published: 1st June 2018

Format: Paperback

Pages: 368

Price: $14.99

Synopsis:The captivating debut children’s novel from popular television historian Lucy Worsley is an exciting and charming glimpse behind the scenes of the Tudor court.

I would often wonder about my future husband. A knight? A duke? A stable boy?
Of course the last was just a wicked fancy.

Eliza Rose Camperdowne is young and headstrong, but she knows her duty well. As the only daughter of a noble family, she must one day marry a man who is very grand and very rich.

But Fate has other plans. When Eliza becomes a maid of honour, she’s drawn into the thrilling, treacherous court of Henry the Eighth …

Is her glamorous cousin Katherine Howard a friend or a rival?

And can a girl choose her own destiny in a world ruled by men?

~*~

The Tudor years were fascinating, grim and violent, and the stories that are told don’t always reveal everything that happened behind the scenes of court – but rather, what Henry VIII wanted people to see and how the court projected itself. Eliza Rose Camperdowne – a fictional character who will become caught up in the intrigue and deception of court under two queens – Anne of Cleves and Katherine Howard, whose untimely fate concludes the book. Eliza’s world is changed when a marriage falls apart and she is sent away to train to be a lady in waiting, and then assigned with her cousin, Katherine Howard to become ladies in waiting to Anne of Cleves. Yet over the years of that marriage, the king, Henry, is taken with Katherine and divorces Anne to wed Eliza’s cousin.

What follows is the court and its intrigues seen through the eyes of Eliza, as she watches rules being broken, where for some, this can have harsh punishments, but for others, seems to have very few consequences until it is too late. Woven throughout is Eliza’s desire to break free of tradition as much as she can – and marry for love, not duty, as she has been trained to do her entire life.

In this sense, Lucy shows the headstrong, and feminist ideas of women throughout the ages, even though they may not have had the words to describe it, the feelings were still there for some of them. She effectively contrasts this with the demure women like Anne, and those who cling to tradition, like Katherine, but who use their wiles and some trickery it seems to reach the goals they have been aiming for: to marry King Henry VIII and become his queen. Katherine was wife five of six – the second to be beheaded for adultery, so the charges went. And after her death, fears are that Eliza could be tainted and tarred with the same brush and she must find a way to change her fate.

Filled with powerful women of all kinds and personalities, the male characters for the most part, are not heavily present in this book, but where they are, they definitely have an impact on the story and its outcomes. All the necessary characters perform their roles really well and it is a great historical read for those interested in Tudor history.